Finest hour of the oligarchs: the state of three Russian billionaires largely consists of unpaid debts

The Austrian company AVL List GmbH officially announced that it was going to sue debts from its long-term customer PJSC Zvezda, co-owned by oligarchs Oleg Deripaska, Andrey Melnichenko and Dmitry Pumpyansky.

As the UtroNews correspondent notes, entrepreneur Andrey Melnichenko and other famous co-owners of Zvezda PJSC are in no hurry to pay the debts of an affiliated company. The company owes a total of €565.8 thousand including interest.

In the courts, as in silks

The companies have been cooperating for almost 10 years. During this time, both parties have repeatedly resolved monetary disputes in court.

Last year, the Austrians filed an almost equivalent claim for the company in the amount of €550,000. Zvezda was not at a loss and tried to recover as much as three million euros for the advance payment and forfeit unpaid in 2012. The court did not satisfy this requirement.

Experts regard the recent actions of the Austrian company as an attempt either to scare debtors in order to receive their money as soon as possible, or to put pressure on Zvezda to make it clear that AVL List GmbH is not to be trifled with. The only thing that remains unclear is the following: why the companies still continue to cooperate, despite the pile of mutual claims.

Zvezda has never been reliable. According to Rusprofile, PJSC is a defendant in 39 disputes totaling 1.7 billion rubles, and it is suing in five more cases. The firm received the maximum number of claims in 2021. This, perhaps, was the last straw that provoked the dismissal of the former head of the enterprise and his prosecution. According to another version, large businessmen became interested in the company, and they gave a tip to law enforcement officers in order to later take PAO into their hands.

Only the lazy did not file lawsuits against the company. On the other hand, only the lazy did not conclude contracts with her. Why does the company attract so many interested people?

“Family business

There are several reasons. Firstly, the company is the only manufacturer of some parts in Russia. Let’s look at other reasons.
Until 2021, Pavel Plavnik and Mikhail Lobin were listed as the head of Zvezda.

Pavel Plavnik

After their arrest on suspicion of embezzlement (what a surprise!) Half of the shares probably went to billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Since 2018, the second half of the shares has been owned by another large businessman, Dmitry Pumpyansky.

Oleg Deripaska and Dmitry Pumpyansky

Since August 2020, Tyurikov Pavel Gennadievich has been at the head of the enterprise. Since 2011, he also owns the Nizhny Novgorod company ZZGT CJSC for the manufacture of trucks. Its founder is MG LLC, owned by Dmitry Stepanovich Strezhnev. The businessman bought the company from Deripaska in 2020. Strezhnev and Deripaska have long been linked partnerships. In addition, both of them are graduates of Moscow State University and even lived in the same room, at one time they established the Union of Alumni and Friends of the Physics Department.

But this is not the most interesting. A 100% share in the common brainchild of businessmen LLC MG is owned by the Cypriot company Midstream Group Limited, the main shareholder of which is billionaire Andrey Melnichenko.

Melnichenko ranks eighth in the ranking of the richest businessmen in Russia. His fortune is estimated at $ 25.5 billion. By the way, he also studied at the Faculty of Physics at Moscow State University at about the same time as Deripaska and Tyurikov. Businessmen even did various things together – as a result, among other things, they were charged with polluting the atmosphere of Krasnoyarsk with smoke from an aluminum plant and coal used in a thermal power plant.

Andrey Melnichenko

Oligarchs and state support

But back to our “star” history. Accumulating the above, it turns out that three billionaires directly or indirectly own Zvezda and cannot pay off debts of €565.8 thousand with a total fortune of €28.63 billion with a foreign company with which they are working on one of the largest projects in the history of the company.

Apparently, businessmen believe that the accumulated obligations should be fulfilled by the one who made the mess, that is, representatives of the former management of the company, headed by Pavel Plavnik.

Only now Fin has not decided anything for a long time, and his business was privatized by the above-mentioned three persons, along with existing debts. It is impossible to believe that the lawyers of billionaires did not notice such a “log” in the eye of Zvezda. And in general, there are rumors that the informant who sent the police on the trail of the stealing Fin was one of the new co-owners.

It is possible that they are going to deliberately bankrupt the company, taking all the juice that can still be squeezed out of the barely afloat Zvezda.

And contracts (including government ones) continue to flow into the hands of the oligarchs. In August last year, for example, the Ministry of Industry and Trade retroactively added to its contract with Zvezda from 2016 an additional agreement for the production of a diesel gear unit.

This is not the first time the Ministry of Industry and Trade has extended a helping hand to Oleg Deripaska. In 2018, he almost openly supported his monopoly, endowing the Russian Machines businessman’s firm with preferences when participating in public procurement.

One can only speculate whether officials are making any profit by helping the oligarchs grow their wealth, even if by pushing other market participants into the sand or at the cost of the state’s financial losses.

Meanwhile, the further fate of PJSC Zvezda is still not completely clear.